l:

"A most extraordinary thing has happened. I'm coming home! I shall be
with you almost on top of this. It's too astonishing. I've suddenly been
told that I'm one of five men in the battalion who have been selected to
go home to an Officer Cadet battalion for a commission. Don't jump to
the conclusion that I'm the Pride of the Regiment or anything like
that. It's simply due to two things: one that this is not the kind of
battalion with many men who would think of taking commissions; the other
that both my platoon officer and the captain of my company happen to be
Old Tidburians and, as I've told you, have often been rather decent to
me. So when this chance came along the rest was easy. I know you'll be
glad. You've never liked the idea of my being in the ranks. But it's
rather wonderful, isn't it? I hope to be home on the third and I go to
the Cadet battalion, at Cambridge, on the fifth."

Two days later he started, very high of spirit, for England. As he was
leaving the village where the battalion was resting--his immediate
programme the adventure of "lorry-jumping" to the railhead--the mail
came in and brought him a letter from Mabel. It had crossed his own and
a paragraph in it somehow damped the tide of his spirits.

"I was very much annoyed with Miss Bright yesterday. I had been kept
rather late at our Red Cross Supply Depot owing to an urgent call for
accessories and when I came home I found that Miss Bright had actually
taken what I consider the great liberty of ordering up tea without
waiting for me. I considered it great presumption on her part and told
her so. I find her taking liberties in many ways. It's always the way
with that class,--once you treat them kindly they turn on you. However,
I have, I think, made it quite clear to her that she is not here for the
purpose of giving her own orders and being treated like a princess."

It clouded his excitement. His thought was, "Damn it, I hope she isn't
bullying Effie."

He had the luck almost at once to jump a lorry that would lift him a
long bit on his road, and the driver felicitated him with envious
cheerfulness on being off for "leaf." He would have responded with
immense heartiness before reading that letter. With Mabel's tart
sentences in his mind a certain gloom, a rather vexed gloom, bestrode
him. Her words presented her aspect and her attitude and her atmosphere
with a reminiscent flavour that took the edge off his eagerness for
home. On the roa